Q3 Highlight Recovery - LRc vs C1

[nameBrandon]

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Has anyone noticed highlight recovery seems far superior with Q3 DNG's when using LRc vs Capture One?

It seems as if Lightroom takes a minimal amount of effort to pull back highlights, whereas Capture One really doesn't seem to be able to keep up. Including an example of a DNG (also linked here for download locally - https://www.dropbox.com/s/5r7tp96ocr6t84a/L1020007.DNG?dl=0 ) where highlights in the window and on camera are blown out, and LR easily recovers with a highlight slider change of -55. Capture One meanwhile can't recover them at all, despite setting highlights and white sliders to -100 (both!).

Now highlight warnings should be set to default (I checked in C1 and they were set to 255.. I didn't see configurable options in LRc).. and I know profiles and colorspace may play a factor here.. There doesn't seem to be much to play with in LRc, the image profile was set to Adobe Color. In C1 rendering was set to perceptual, profile was set to Film Standard, and I was using the Generic Q3 profile (not the ProStandard, which was actually worse).

It's interesting to note, right out the bat (meaning default settings), LRc is showing less of the image as blown out, and no blown highlights on the lens itself, whereas C1 is showing the highlights on the lens as blown own. It's almost like C1 is providing an exposure warning if any individual channel is blown out, and LRc is only indicating a warning if all 3 are.. Just a theory.

Anyway, here are the images showing what I mean..

Base images with highlight warning on, first Capture one (notice the larger portion of the window is a warning, then LRc).

C1

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LRc

 

Now the "corrected" images for highlights.. LR takes a simple slider down to -55 to fix, and C1 cannot fix it with White and Highlights set to -100

LRc

C1

 

Curious if anyone has noticed this as well? Is this just a color management issue, perhaps Lightroom's Colorspace is larger than whatever C1 is using (ProPhoto, perhaps)? I prefer working in Capture One, but this is really difficult to work with. It's not bad here in this image, but when you involve people and skin tones, the results are really much better in LRc..

Thoughts?

Edited October 3, 2023 by nameBrandon

[Qwertynm]

have you looked at the individual channels to see if your hypothesis is plausbile? seems to me because neither the LR nor the C1 image show details in the initial blown out parts but seem to show it differently with LR being more generous in assuming there's detail even if it's still just white pixels. And if you would've shown the blown out red parts without the exposure warning I assume both pictures would show the same amount of details or color in these spots. the file from C1 has more detail in the curtains. How does the LR file look like with -100 Highlights? 

Personally I shoot in highlight weighted metering and lift the shadows in post. It used to be ETTR. Now it's more like expose for the hightlights and fix the rest in post.

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[Miltz]

Since DNG files are Adobe files it would make sense that Adobe can get more out of it it’s own files than capture one. 

[Qwertynm]

DNG was developed by Adobe. It's a losless open standard, which the industry has adopted. Surely C1 can extract the same details as LR out of a DNG file.

[nameBrandon]

Well, after some experimentation, I was able to get much more LR like results (meaning the rest of the image was less impacted) by adjusting the white point of the luma curves slider. So it appears the math that is used between the two application sliders to adjust whites and highlights are different.. which is no surprise, but still, you'd think C1 would provide some direction on such a significant capability difference.

Anyway, here's the resulting change in C1 and the image after adjusting the luma curve.

 

 

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[SrMi]

On 10/3/2023 at 8:55 AM, Qwertynm said:

<snip>

Personally I shoot in highlight weighted metering and lift the shadows in post. It used to be ETTR. Now it's more like expose for the hightlights and fix the rest in post.

ETTR method requires not clipping relevant highlights. How did you do ETTR before?

[SrMi]

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On 10/3/2023 at 9:48 AM, Miltz said:

Since DNG files are Adobe files it would make sense that Adobe can get more out of it it’s own files than capture one. 

There are some variations of DNG that C1 has some issues with, but if C1 supports Q3, then it should be able to support Q3's raw files as well as Adobe. The same is true for all Leica raw files (SL2, M11, ...).

Edited October 4, 2023 by SrMi

[hansvons]

In C1, it’s often advisable to correct exposure to the desired highlights, perhaps bring them down a bit and then adjust the shadows accordingly. That way, you will get a balanced gamma curve.

The aim is to keep the gamma/contrast curve as harmonious as possible. By pulling the highlight slider down to the bottom, the curve will flat out in the top parts. That is desirable to a certain degree (the infamous white roll-off) but has aesthetically its limits. YMMV, of course.